I could write a book on this topic. Well, I actually have written a book about it, when you take the word counts of all the fanfiction and meta I've written. In the beginning, I enjoyed Spike as a fake-out Big Bad in season two, though I was never quite as enchanted by him and Drusilla as most people. I think his antagonism, especially to Angel, was hilarious and the whole second season was a ball in so many ways, but it wasn't until that moment when he saves Buffy from being arrested, and then subsequently meets her mom, that I became the dreaded Spike Fan.

It was completely his relationship to the Summers women, even Dawn a while later and extending that to Willow, because Lovers Walk is still one of my favorite Buffy eps ever, that changed how I felt about him. Even before he fell in love with Buffy, it was the strange give and take he had going with Joyce and Buffy that mesmerized me. It was funny, it was tense, and you never really knew which way he would go when he was around them. Much like poor Willow when he kidnapped her in S3, we had no idea if he would kill them or just hang with them, and ask for mini marshmallows in his cocoa. For some reason that made me deliriously happy; I've never really understood what it was, but that unexpected tension really worked for me.

I don't know that I have a bulletproof kink, but if I do, it's found family. Even though he was a vampire, he needed a family to replace what he'd lost when Angel and Darla and Dru and he had gone their separate ways. I loved the way he settled on Joyce as someone he wanted to be part of his family; when he shows up at their house in Lovers Walk of course we think something terrible will happen, and then we cut back to him and Joyce and she's there-thereing him while he complains about his lost love.

As much as Buffy tried to reject him, that slow friendship development that happens in season 5 is my favorite after season 2, the way she comes to rely on him when the things with Dawn and her mother are happening, and then you throw in the friendship that develops with Dawn, I was in heaven. There are a lot of things that I hate about S6 and S7, but the lack of Spike family friendship with Dawn and Buffy is a huge part of it. And as much of a Spuffy shipper person as I am, and thus should have been happy at the sexual relationship that developed, I would have traded all that for more Joyce and Spike, Dawn and Spike, and Buffy and Spike being friends and co-demon hunters.

I looooved writing Spike. Just absolutely loved it, despite him being so very different from me. And honestly, I think the single biggest reason I loved writing him was being able to write his relationships with Summers women (and by extension, women who were in some way connected to them: Willow, Cordelia, Fred, and even Dana). There were so many layers there. Really, if they hadn't soured so much of the experience for me, I'd probably have been content to write them forever.